Red alert to the suburbs: Soccer may be great for developing sinewy legs and good coordination, but all that head-butting might not be so good for your brain. A study found that soccer players who frequently "head" the ball score lower on a set of neurocognitive tests than players who don't rely on their noggins so much.
Frank Webbe, a professor of psychology at Florida Tech, also found that those ballplayers who headed the ball most often—and had played within the past seven days—suffered the most cognitive deficits.
Webbe is not ready to claim that kiddie soccer champs will do worse in school: "We haven't adequately established the relationship between neurocognitive tests and typical school exams," he says. But some other research has shown that soccer players may fare worse than other athletes on these tests.
